Luscombe D., Riley-Smith J. The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 4: c. 1024-c. 1198, Part 2

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Abbasids, Fatimids and Seljuqs 691

threat of invasion of the lands on the periphery of the central Asiatic steppe by

the horse-riding nomads who had appeared in Europe as the Huns; who had

forced the Chinese to build the Great Wall; and whose wars with Iran were

the stuff of legend, woven by Firdausi in the reign of Mahmud of Ghazna into

the Persian epic of the Shah-nama or Book of Kings, and passing into English

literature as the tale of Sohrab and Rustam. In the eleventh century, as Firdausi

composed his masterpiece, that threat revived as the Turkish peoples closest to

the Muslim frontier, the Qarluq and the Oghuz or Ghuzz, adopted Islam and

advanced into Muslim territory.

At the end of the tenth century, as Mahmud of Ghazna seized the bulk of

Samanid territory to the south of the Oxus, the Qarluq took over the homeland

of the dynasty in Transoxania, and established their own Qarakhanid dynasty at

Bukhara, whose power extended eastwards over the mountains to Kashghar in

Farghana or Sinkiang.

To the west of the Qarluq towards the Aral Sea and the

Volga, the Oghuz under their yabghu or khan were divided between paganism

and Islam, which provided a minority of the chieﬂy clan with the opportunity

to combat their rivals as ghazis or warriors upon the inﬁdel. These were the

sons of the eponymous chieftain Seljuq, who meanwhile became involved

in the wars of the Qarakhanids in Transoxania and were eventually expelled

southwards across the Oxus into Ghaznavid Khurasan. In an extraordinary

decade following the death of Mahmud in 1030 and the accession of his son

Mas

ud, they and their nomadic followers, too elusive to be brought to battle,

overran the province. In pursuit, the ponderous Ghaznavid army was deprived

of the plunder it was accustomed to win and the revenue it expected to enjoy.

Lured out into the desert in 1040,itwas routed by the mobile Seljuq horde at

the battle of Dandanqan. The harsh and unpopular Ghaznavid regime in Iran

collapsed, leaving the dynasty only with its capital at Ghazna and its conquests

in India, while the victorious Seljuq brothers, Tughril, Chaghri and Musa

Yabghu, divided Iran between them.

Leaving the east to Chaghri and Musa, Tughril, the leader if not the eldest,

turned west with his half-brother Ibrahim Inal to occupy the old Buyid king-

dom of Rayy in 1041–3. There, they had been preceded by scattered bands of

Oghuz who had ﬂed from the wars in Khurasan, only to become embroiled

in the warfare attending the efforts of the Daylami Kakuyids of Hamadan

to win back the kingdom for themselves from the clutches of Mas

ud. These

bands of nomads, seeking pasture for their sheep as much as plunder, were con-

stantly augmented as the victories of the Seljuqs opened the way to a stream

of such emigrants out of their homelands into the pastures of northern Iran,

from where they moved westwards towards Anatolia. Known as Turkmen or

See Bosworth (1967), pp. 111–14, and (1968), pp. 5–7.

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Tu r comans, they were already into Azerbayjan and in the 1040s spread into

Armenia, northern Iraq and northern Syria: Mosul was sacked in 1044.As

Tughril moved into Rayy and Ibrahim Inal into Hamadan, they ﬂed away

from the Seljuqs’ claim to overlordship and obedience. Beneath and ahead of

the advance of the new Seljuq empire, a major new element was appearing in

the population of the Near and Middle East.

Tughril may have followed the Turcomans westwards quite as much as he led

them. What gave his advance its purpose was nevertheless his adoption of the

pro-

Abbasid and speciﬁcally anti-Fatimid rhetoric of Masud, which brought

this extraordinary story of an immigration that became an empire ﬁrmly into

the context of Islam and its concerns. Whatever the Islam of the Seljuqs may

have been at the outset of their career on the frontier, their profession of faith

was a prerequisite of their participation in the wars of a Muslim country like

Transoxania, and certainly a condition of success in the struggle for Khurasan.

Without a cause or religious leader of their own, moreover, it was necessary that

this Islam should be not only Sunni but

Abbasid. Thus the announcement of

victory at Dandanqan was sent straight from the battleﬁeld to Baghdad. It is

clear that the Seljuqs had already conceived the possibility of power on these

terms, and proceeded to claim the mantle of the Ghaznavids for the purpose,

no doubt under the strong inﬂuence of the Khurasanian secretaries who passed

into their service from the Ghaznavids.

In choosing the west as his province,

Tughril as leader was identifying the ambitions of the Seljuqs with the cause

of Sunni empire.

That did not prevent his marriage alliance with the last powerful Buyid

ruler of Fars, Abu Kalijar

Imad al-Din (1024–48), the victor in the long suc-

cession dispute following the death of Baha

 al-Dawla in 1012, which had

thrown the Buyid regime in Baghdad into anarchy. The 1040swere not in fact

a time of spectacular advance; the Seljuqs and the Turcomans in western Iran

were confronted by a multiplicity of peoples and petty dynasties in the moun-

tainous terrain with whom they were obliged to deal. The cause of empire

was not helped by the growing divisions between the Turcomans on the one

hand, the Seljuq leadership on the other, and between the leaders themselves.

These divisions centred around the ﬁgure of Tughril’s partner Ibrahim Inal at

Hamadan, who sided with the Turcomans in their opposition to Seljuq control,

while encouraging and occasionally leading their westward movement towards

Anatolia. The growth of Tughril’s power may have been steady, but it was

consequently slow, and depended for its greatest advance in this period upon

the death of Abu Kalijar at Shiraz in 1048 and the struggle over the succession

See Bosworth (1975), pp. 187–95, and (1968), pp. 16–23, 23–53 passim.

Bosworth (1968), pp. 45–6.

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Abbasids, Fatimids and Seljuqs 693

that promptly ensued. The barriers to the Turcoman invasion of Fars then col-

lapsed; meanwhile Tughril, recognized by the Marwanids of Amid or Diyarbakr

in 1049–50, took the remaining Kakuyid city of Isfahan as his capital in 1050–1

and proceeded to intervene in the succession at Shiraz, until by 1055 the Buyid

kingdom under its new ruler Fulad-Sutun was all but annexed. The way was

open to Baghdad, under the ineffective rule of Abu Kalijar’s other son al-Malik

al-Rahim. Control of the city was disputed between the Turkish commander

al-Basasiri and Ibn al-Muslima, the wazir whom the

Abbasid caliph al-Qaim

had appointed in 1045 as a mark of his increasing independence. In 1055 Tughril

assembled his forces for an expedition which, in the manner of the Ghaznavid

Mas

ud, looked beyond Baghdad to the pilgrimage to Mecca and a war upon

the Fatimids in Egypt. In December he made a processional entry into the

city, received by the ofﬁcers of the caliph though not by al-Qa

im in person,

to fulﬁl the imperial destiny of the new dynasty.

the appearance of the banu hilal

The tribes of bedouin Arabs, collectively known as the Banu Hilal, who made

their appearance in North Africa in the middle of the eleventh century, shared

with the Seljuqs a similar involvement in the conﬂict between Cairo and

Baghdad, so much so that they are commonly said to have been sent from

Egypt by the Fatimids in 1051 to punish the Zirids of Ifriqiya for their desertion

to the

Abbasids. This, however, is a legend rooted in Fatimid historiography,

obscuring a different reality. The Banu Hilal belonged to what Ibn Khaldun

called ‘the Arabs of the fourth age’, who had been left behind in the desert

by the conquerors belonging to the great third age of the race, to emerge

as the modern representatives of the ancient nation and its virtues after the

founders of the Arab empire had been swallowed up by the civilization they

had created.

Not strictly tribesmen from outside the old Arab empire, they

nevertheless exempliﬁed the utter savagery of people adapted to a life of utmost

hardship, as far as possible from that of settlement and cities, by which they

were alternately attracted and repulsed.

In the heart of Arabia, they had gone

far to make the desert crossing from Iraq to Mecca and Medina impassable since

the heyday of the

Abbasid empire, whence the stated aim of the Ghaznavids

and Seljuqs to open the route and make the pilgrimage. On the fringes of

the Fertile Crescent, they had revolted unsuccessfully on behalf of the Fatimid

mahdi at the beginning of the tenth century, but had subsequently given rise

to bedouin dynasties such as the

Uqaylids and Mirdasids. In Egypt they had

See Brett (1982).

See Cheddadi (1986), pp. 135–6, 419–24.

Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, i,pp.250–2, 306–8, ii,pp.279–80.

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spread southwards on either side of the Nile towards Aswan, and wandered

westwards out into the territories of the native Berber nomads of the Sahara.

In the second half of the tenth century, the Banu Hilal were reported by Ibn

Hawqal to frequent the western oases of Kharga and Dakhla.

But in the

eleventh century, bedouin such as the Banu Qurra of Cyrenaica had shared in

the revolt of Abu Rakwa against Hakim and had gone on to take control of

Barqa. In 1037–8, the Hilali tribe of the Zughba had killed the Berber prince

of Tripoli, Sa

id ibn Khazrun, and ten years later were entering into an alliance

with Mu

izz ibn Badis, the Zirid sultan of Ifriqiya.

As warrior nomads newly

established in the northern Sahara, they entered in this way into the politics of

the Fatimid empire in North Africa at a time when it was under great strain,

presenting Cairo with a far more immediate problem than the advance of the

Seljuqs in the east.

In Cairo, the gap between the affairs of the Dawla proper in Egypt and Syria,

and the concerns of the Fatimid empire at large, was slow to close. The 1040s

wereadecade in which the regime was preoccupied with the succession to the

wazirate following the death of al-Jarjara

iin1045.Ever since the accession of

the infant Imam–Caliph al-Mustansir in 1036, this eminently capable politi-

cian had been faced with the hostility of the new queen-mother Rasad, who

employed her immense personal wealth as Sitt al-Mulk and Ruqiyya had done,

to build up a following in the administration, this time in opposition to the

old wazir. Al-Jarjara

i was weakened by his distrust of his old ally al-Dizbiri in

Syria. In 1041 he engineered a military coup at Damascus which drove Dizbiri,

branded a traitor, into exile and death at Aleppo. Aleppo itself was promptly

reoccupied by the Mirdasids; the Jarrahids of Palestine were again in revolt;

and the new governor of Damascus, Nasir al-Dawla ibn Hamdan, a scion of

the old Hamdanid dynasty, was unable to restore the position. In Egypt, the

queen-mother’s coterie was headed by Abu Sa

d al-Tustari, the Iranian Jewish

merchant who had purveyed her as a concubine to the caliph al-Zahir, and now

served as steward of her estates. When al-Jarjara

i died, his chief lieutenants

were the only possible candidates for the succession; but the ﬁrst, al-Anbari, was

almost immediately deposed, and his colleague, the converted Jew al-Fallahi,

was appointed on the recommendation of al-Tustari, whose inﬂuence was now

paramount. Al-Anbari was imprisoned and executed; but in 1047 the new

wazir rebelled against his tutelage, and connived at the murder of al-Tustari

in the street by Turkish soldiery. For this he too was deposed, imprisoned

and eventually executed; al-Tustari’s brother Abu Nasr was given charge of

the khizanat al-khass or ‘privy purse’ of the caliph, while the stewardship of

Ibn Hawqal, Surat al-ard, ed. Kramers, p. 155; trans. Kramers and Wiet, p. 153.

See Brett (1974–5).

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Abbasids, Fatimids and Seljuqs 695

the queen-mother’s estates went to a very different man, the Ismaili scholar

al-Yazuri from Ramla in Palestine. The wazirate itself remained in the hands

of the Jarjara

i faction in the person of the great man’s nephew, Abul-Barakat

al-Jarjara

i, whose notorious arrests, banishments and conﬁscations were pre-

sumably intended to secure himself against the fate of his two predecessors.

He attempted to remove al-Yazuri from politics by appointing him chief qadi

and chief da

i; but al-Yazuri survived by appointing his son as his deputy over

the queen-mother’s estates.

The tension was only resolved by a disastrous expedition against Aleppo

in 1049, for which Abu’l-Barakat was responsible, and for which he was dis-

missed. In 1050 al-Yazuri was appointed in his place and the transfer of power

within the administration from one party to another was ﬁnally complete.

His position was by no means so secure as that of al-Jarjara

i, in that the fol-

lowers of his predecessor remained entrenched in the army of secretaries and

soldiers, jealous of his promotion and anxious for their places. Enjoying the

conﬁdence of the palace, al-Yazuri was nevertheless able to assert his authority

at home and abroad, beginning with Syria, where he and his chief military ally

Nasir al-Dawla effected a reconciliation with the Mirdasids. The alliance with

Byzantium was conﬁrmed, while to the south, an expedition, sent to Nubia

to demand the tribute known as the baqt or ‘pact’, renewed the Fatimids’ gen-

erally friendly relations with the Christian kingdom.

From the Yemen came

a bonus in the form of presents sent by the da

i al-Sulayhi to announce the

progress of the campaign of conquest he had undertaken in 1038.

Out to the

west, however, the situation was more menacing.

Morally and materially, the position of the Zirids of Ifriqiya had been un-

dermined since the beginning of the century. Their western province in Algeria

had been lost to their cousins the Hammadids, while Tripoli had been seized

by the Banu Khazrun, Zanata Berber nomads from western Algeria militarized

by acentury of war between the Fatimids and the Umayyads of Cordoba in

the west. Their control of the oases of southern Tunisia was threatened not only

by the immigrant Zanata, but by the Berber populations of Djerba, the Ja-

bal Nafusa and the Djerid, the majority of whom were Ibadis, opposed to

Shi

ites and Sunnis alike. At Qayrawan itself, the old Arab capital of the

Besides al-Maqrizi’s Ittiaz, the principal sources for the history of Egypt in this period are, in

chronological order: Ibn al-Sayraﬁ, Al-Ishara (to 1130); Ibn Muyassar, Akhbar Misr (late thirteenth

century); and al-Maqrizi, Khitat (early ﬁfteenth century); together with Ibn al-Athir, Kitab (early

thirteenth century).

Al-Maqrizi, Ittiaz, ii,p.222.Forthe baqt as the basis of Egyptian relations with Nubia in the Muslim

period, see Cambridge History of Africa (1978), ii,pp.505–6, 565–7, and passim; Hasan (1967), pp.

20–8, 90–3.

Ibid.

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country, the dynasty resident in the old Fatimid palace of Sabra, confronted

an unruly populace. The grievances of the citizens were probably economic,

in that the prosperity generated by the Fatimids had diminished, while that

of Tunis in particular is likely to have increased.

But they were made spe-

ciﬁc by the opposition between the dynasty which ruled in the name of the

Fatimid imam and the Sunni

ulama or jurists of the Malikite school, who

had made Qayrawan one of the great seats of Sunni scholarship. Behind their

learned objections to Isma

ilism stood a militant zeal which threatened not

only riot but revolution. In 1016 or 1017, following the accession of the young

sultan Mu

izz ibn Badis, and in the ﬁnal phase of Hakim’s reign, the crowd

throughout Ifriqiya turned on the Isma

ilis and massacred them in deﬁance

of the authorities. The long reign of Mu

izz became in consequence a slow

movement towards Sunnism, in which the sultan allied with the greater jurists

in the hope of isolating and eliminating the more radical preachers. By the

1030s and 1040s, the regime was increasingly embattled, campaigning against

the Hammadids on the one hand, the Zanata on the other. Mu

izz nevertheless

intervened in the quarrels of Muslim Sicily as the Kalbid dynasty at Palermo

weakened, apparently hoping to annex the island; the attempt was a failure,

and the Ifriqiyans were expelled, either by the Sicilians themselves or by the

Byzantine general George Maniakes in 1038–40.Despite the lack of success,

this obscure episode preﬁgured a grander attempt to revive the fortunes of the

dynasty by seizing the initiative at home and abroad.

In 1048,Muizz formally abjured his allegiance to the imam–caliph, and

transferred it to the

Abbasids. The date given by the Zirid chronicler Ibn

Sharaf

is conﬁrmed by the coinage, which in ah 441, 1049–50, changed from

the gold dinar of the Fatimids to one bearing the Qur

anic legend – ‘Whoever

chooses a religion other than Islam, it shall not be accepted from him, and

in the Hereafter he shall be lost’ – a denunciation of the Fatimids and their

followers as heretics.

Diplomatic relations with Baghdad may have dated

from the appointment of Ibn al-Muslima as

Abbasid wazir in 1045; the Persian

al-Darimi, who had served under Mahmud of Ghazna, apparently arrived as

Abbasid envoy to Qayrawan in 1047–8.

A second such envoy was seized

by the Byzantines at Antioch in 1051 and sent to Cairo, where the

Abbasid

insignia he was taking to Mu

izz were publicly burnt.

It was all that al-

Yazuri could do in reply to an opponent who had captured the Sunni cause in

North Africa, and set out to create a rival Sunni empire in the west. The Banu

Khazrun at Tripoli and the Banu Qurra at Barqa both declared for Baghdad

See Brett (1969).

For exhaustive references, see Idris (1962); Amari (1937–9).

As reported by Ibn Idhari, Al-Bayan al-muqhrib,pp.277–9.

SeeHazard (1952), pp. 52–5, 90–3.

Idris (1962), pp. 191–2.

See Brett (1982), p. 49.

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Abbasids, Fatimids and Seljuqs 697

and Muizz. Under their amir Jabbara ibn Mukhtar, the Banu Qurra, who had

risen against the Fatimids under Abu Rakwa at the beginning of the century,

attacked Alexandria once again in 1052, only to be defeated.

izz’s ambitions, however, came to grief much nearer home. From around

the time of his breach with Cairo in 1048, the sultan had allied with the Hilali

Arab bedouin tribes of Zughba and Riyah, to whom he had given land in return

for military service. The land in question is likely to have been the Jaffara plain

between Gabes and Tripoli, a strategic corridor blocked by the Germans in the

Second World War at Mareth, and threatened in the eleventh century by the

Berbers of Djerba and the Jabal Nafusa. Such an attempt to pacify the region

nevertheless failed when the Arabs advanced north of Gabes in search of more

land. In 1052 a major expedition led by Mu

izz to reassert his authority over the

south was ambushed by the two tribes in hilly county some two or three day’s

march from Qayrawan, and routed at the battle of Haydaran. With the loss of

all his baggage, Mu

izz ﬂed back to his capital, which was promptly besieged as

the Arabs overran the countryside. A disaster which might have been remedied

was made permanent by the appeal of the Riyah and Zughba to Cairo, and the

intervention of Egypt in the following year. While the tribes were encouraged

to resume the siege of Qayrawan, al-Yazuri’s envoy, the general Amin al-Dawla

wa Makinuha Hasan ibn

Ali ibn Mulhim,

appeared at Gabes to receive

the submission of the cities of Ifriqiya on the one hand, and the breakaway

Hammadids of eastern Algeria on the other, returning to Cairo with a share

of the booty taken by the Arabs in the battle.

The old state of Ifriqiya,

dating back to Byzantine Africa, ﬁnally disintegrated. Mu

izz abandoned the

inland city of Qayrawan for the more defensible coastal fortress of Mahdia in

1057, while the great metropolis was emptied of its inhabitants. Some jurists

remained to preserve the Malikite tradition, but many emigrated, not least

to Morocco. At Sijilmasa they handed on the torch of Sunni empire to the

Almoravids. This militant Sunni movement, created out of the Sanhaja Berber

nomads of the western Sahara by a prophet of the Malikite school inspired

from Qayrawan, was at the outset of its career, victorious in the desert and

advancing north. The dinars ﬁrst minted by the Almoravids at Sijilmasa in

the year of Mu

izz’s ﬂight to Mahdia replicated his aggressively Sunni coinage,

while at Mahdia itself the Zirids reverted to their Fatimid allegiance and thus

to the Fatimid style.

It was in the name of Sunni Islam that the Almoravids

went on to build an empire of their own in the Muslim west, one that under

the Almohads in the following century embraced Ifriqiya itself.

Thus in the Fatimid letter which is the fundamental document: Brett (1982), pp. 51–2, but Makin

al-Dawla in the chronicles.

See Brett (1974–5) and (1982).

See Launois (1964); Idris (1962), pp. 225–6.

698 michael brett

The Almoravids effected the third great invasion of the old Arab empire by

tribal nomads drawn into Islam by the religious and political quarrels of the

Shi

ite century. In North Africa, they represented the same appeal of Islam to the

tribal population to make a new submission to God to ﬁght for the faith against

His enemies, which had brought the Fatimids to power in Ifriqiya 150 years

before and was to culminate in the takeover of their empire by the Almohads

100 years later.

Unlike either the Seljuqs or the Banu Hilal, they formed a

speciﬁcally religious as well as ethnic community, which, although it founded

an empire, as did the Seljuqs, was unaccompanied by an inﬂux of nomads who

altered the composition of the population in the lands it conquered. The Banu

Hilal, on the other hand, founded no empire, despite the favour shown by the

Fatimids to leaders like the Riyahid Mu

nis ibn Yahya, who posed in southern

Tunisia as the Sahib Ifriqiya or Lord of Ifriqiya, and despite the prominence

of the bedouin in the campaigns of the warring princes who ruled the country

for the next hundred years. Their failure to rise to the imperial occasion, even

in the absence of a religious leader, is all the more remarkable in view of the

progressive bedouinization and Arabization of the rural population, which

over the centuries has reduced the native Berber element to a minority.

The

fact remains that even at their kingmaking worst, the Banu Hilal remained as

nomads within the framework of the state system.

the crisis of the fatimid empire

Ironically, the return of the Zirids to Fatimid allegiance in 1057,evenatthe cost

of the disintegration of their dominions, was a triumph for al-Yazuri which he

did not live to enjoy. Early in 1058 he was arrested and executed on a charge of

treason. Over the two years since the arrival of Tughril Beg in Baghdad at the

end of 1055, the internal and external affairs of the Fatimid realm had drawn

together with a vengeance to precipitate a crisis at home and abroad. The

elements of the crisis had fallen into place over a number of years, beginning

with the situation in Baghdad itself, where ﬁghting between Sunnis and Shi

ites

accompanied the hostility between the

Abbasid wazir Ibn al-Muslima and the

Tu r kish commander al-Basasiri, who as the Buyid regime weakened had turned

towards Egypt. In Egypt itself, al-Yazuri faced a domestic trial of strength in the

form of famine in 1052 and 1054–5. The problem was not so much shortage of

grain as hoarding; the difﬁculty was to force supplies on to the market, since the

speculators were not only the merchants but the landholding aristocracy, from

the caliph down. The last serious famine, in 1024–5,had provoked disturbances

because, in the years leading up to al-Jarjara

i’s appointment as wazir, he and his

See Brett (1983) and (1994b).

SeeBrett and Fentress (1995), ch. 4.

Abbasids, Fatimids and Seljuqs 699

colleagues had taken no action in the matter, presumably to avoid antagonizing

their backers.

Al-Yazuri did so, to the extent of advising the caliph to invest

in less publicly harmful activities, as well as ensuring that all grain collected in

taxes reached the state granaries for release on to the market;

but he cannot

have made many friends in high places. More immediately, he sought grain

from Byzantium; but the emperor Constantine IX died in January 1055 and the

aid was refused by the aged empress Theodora, anxious not to antagonize the

Seljuqs pushing into Armenia and eastern Anatolia. Egypt was in consequence

unable to supply the Hijaz with the grain on which the pilgrimage depended.

Since at the same time the empress had ordered the prayers in the mosque

at Constantinople to be said in the name of the

Abbasids rather than the

Fatimids, Egypt declared war, sending Makin al-Dawla ibn Mulhim, returned

from his mission to Ifriquiya, to attack both Antioch and Aleppo, where the

Mirdasids had allied with the Turcomans. When Tughril Beg ﬁnally entered

Baghdad, the Fatimids in Syria were in arms.

Ousted by the Seljuqs from Baghdad, al-Basasiri moved up to Rahba on

the Euphrates, and appealed to Cairo for aid. Behind al-Yazuri at this juncture

stood the distinguished Iranian da

i al-Muayyad ﬁl-Din al-Shirazi, the last of

the great Fatimid philosophers, who, like his predecessor al-Kirmani, hailed

from the Buyid realm of Fars. In the 1030s and 1040shehad spent some ten

years at the court of Abu Kalijar, who lent a sympathetic ear to his exposition

of Isma

ilism until Abbasid pressure forced his expulsion to Cairo in 1046–7.

At Cairo al-Shirazi was thwarted by the appointment of al-Yazuri as chief da

i,

who bestowed the post on the descendants of the qadi al-Nu

man when he

became wazir, but in 1052 took charge of the diwan al-insha

 or chancellery, the

ofﬁce of state correspondence and diplomacy. Al-Shirazi persuaded al-Yazuri

to accede to al-Basasiri’s request, and he was duly entrusted with the mission

of organizing and ﬁnancing an Arab tribal coalition in northern Syria and Iraq

for the purpose. In 1057,while Makin al-Dawla continued the offensive against

Antioch and Aleppo with the help of reinforcements sent under the command

of al-Yazuri’s son, al-Basasiri defeated the Seljuqs at Sinjar north of Mosul and

brieﬂy occupied Mosul itself. In 1058 the effort was crowned with success. At

the beginning of the year Makin al-Dawla captured Aleppo, and sent the body

of al-Dizbiri, driven into exile by al-Jarjara

i, to Cairo for honourable burial.

At the end of the year, while Tughril Beg was drawn away from Baghdad by the

revolt of Ibrahim Inal, he occupied the city and proclaimed the suzerainty of

the Fatimids. Al-Basasiri’s great enemy, the

Abbasid wazir Ibn al-Muslima, was

put to a frightful death, but the

Abbasid caliph himself was placed under the

protection of the

Uqaylid prince Quraysh. Only the insignia of his caliphate

SeeBianquis (1980).

Al-Maqrizi, Ittiaz, ii,pp.224–6; idem, Trait

e des famines,pp.18–22.

700 michael brett

were sent to Cairo, where they were received in triumph by Mustansir in

1059.From the Fatimid point of view, the episode was a crowning victory for

the dynasty’s campaign to win the world for the imam by revolution rather

than conquest, especially since the da

i al-Sulayhi in the Yemen was on the

verge of complete success. But whereas the campaign in the Yemen was one

of dedication, the league commanded by al-Basasiri was an ephemeral alliance

of the forces of anarchy in late Buyid Iraq. The return of Tughril Beg from

his ﬁnal victory over Ibrahim Inal at the end of the year drove al-Basasiri

from the city, to die in battle in January 1060.

The whole episode had been,

said the Egyptian chronicler Ibn Muyassar, ‘the last happiness of the Egyptian

empire’.

The train was laid before ever al-Basasiri entered Baghdad. Whatever the

expectations of Mustansir from his capture of the

Abbasid city, Egyptian aid to

the enterprise had been cut off since the spring of 1058.Atthe end of February,

al-Yazuri fell victim to the charge of his opponents that by sending all the wealth

of Egypt for the conquest of Baghdad, he had provoked the wrath of the Seljuqs

and so imperilled the realm. The charge was distorted, and envenomed, by the

accusation of treasonable correspondence with Tughril Beg, and of plans to

ﬂee to Baghdad. The wazir was arrested and executed by order of the caliph. He

was brieﬂy replaced with his close lieutenant al-Babili, until another prot

eof

the queen-mother’s, al-Maghribi, was promoted from within al-Yazuri’s circle

of appointments; the damage, however, was done. The new wazir sought to

disengage the regime from the conﬂict in Iraq, while returning Nasir al-Dawla

al-Hamdani to Damascus to maintain control of Syria; but the regime itself

had been undermined by the execution of his predecessor. Al-Maghribi fell in

1060 in exactly the same way as his predecessor Abu’l-Barakat in 1049,inthe

wake of a major expedition he had sent under Nasir al-Dawla to recapture the

ever-rebellious city of Aleppo, which ended in disaster. But on this occasion no

alternative faction existed within the administration, to whose leader power

could be transferred as it had been from the party of al-Jarjara

itothat of

al-Yazuri ten years previously; and government broke down.

Over the next few years, the wazirate became a merry-go-round of appoint-

ments lasting no more than a few months or weeks, as candidates failed to

gain the support of their colleagues or the palace, and lost all credibility. On

the whole, the turnover was not bloody, as it had been under Hakim; many,

beginning with al-Babili, were appointed three or four times. But the political

system built by al-Jarjara

i for the beneﬁt of the Men of the Pen had collapsed

For the career of al-Shirazi, see Diwan,pp.259–60;Sirat al-Muayyad, p. 56;‘The Sira’; for that of

al-Basasiri, see Encyclopaedia of Islam (1954–),s.v. art. Canard.

IbnMuyassar, Akhbar Misr,p.21.